Spencer Bailey

He was teaching at the Center for Fiction, and at the time they were in Midtown, and I was the youngest student in the class.

I was 24 at the time.

Most of the students were out of the Columbia MFA program.

There was a neuroscientist in the class, I remember.

There was a guy who was in his 50s who would fly from California every week to be in that room.

A lot of brilliant minds, including Mitchell S. Jackson, who has since gone on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

So, yeah.

That's too shabby.

Really amazing room of people.

So I was intimidated by him and by the people in the room.

But I think where he instilled fear was his teaching method, which was so...

you had to read a sentence aloud in front of the class.

If you liked the sentence, then you could go to a paragraph.

If you liked the paragraph, then you could attempt to write a story, basically.

That's a very simple way of putting it.

But that intensity, and it would start at 5 p.m., and it was supposed to end at 10, but a lot of the times it would go till 2 in the morning.

And so I'm like, you know, walking in Midtown Manhattan, bleary-eyed at

two in the morning after a seven-hour workshop.

It was intense.

But he taught with this zeal.